ATD Reviews
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Reviews
Please add any relevant reviews as they come in. Blog reviews are acceptable as long as they're substantial and more than just a few paragraphs.
12/11/06 - New York Magazine - Keith Gessen: "Against the Day is exhausting, twisted, and paranoid. But that doesn’t mean Pynchon can’t also be fun."
12/4/06 - New Statesman (UK)) - Rachel Aspden: "The deluge of science can blind us to the fact that he is, temperamentally, a mystic rather than a technician. He writes Against the Day, but seeks what lies beyond or under or above the quotidian."
12/2/06 - The Times (UK) - Douglas Kennedy: "Certainly, Pynchon’s new novel displays, for all to see, his “lost in the funhouse” narrative proclivities, his intellectual super-nova fireworks and his delight in the arcane, the base, the idiotic."
12/1/06 - Financial Times (UK) - Ludovic Hunter-Tilney: "There remains much to admire in the workings of his singularly brilliant literary consciousness, but the suspicion remains that Pynchon’s self-removal from public life now extends to the page."
12/1/06 - Newsweek Pt. III - Malcom Jones: "Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel is long, densely plotted, long, silly, profound, long—everything most modern novels aren’t—and yet it still works."
12/1/06 - Chicago Reader - Jonathan Rosenbaum: "The momentary pleasures of reading Against the Day often come close to seeming random, and reconciling the book's larger aims with all the jazzy improvs is no easy matter -- though that's what Pynchon's game is all about."
12/06-1/07 - Bookforum - Tom LeClair: "I hope some future scholar will read the novel twenty times and either illustrate how it recapitulates the whole history of narrative or demonstrate how every piece fits together into a fourfold design that will replace four-base genetics as a model of all life."
11/29/06 - The Times Literary Supplement (UK) - Sophie Ratcliffe: "This is not to say Pynchon suggests any solution. What he does is highlight how invisible our claims for salvation are, thus disturbing all the familiar comforts they might offer, including the comforts of the novel’s structure. This gets its clearest exposition in his handling of the relentlessly optimistic airborne crew at the novel’s end."
11/28/06 - Entertainment Weekly - Ken Tucker: "Beyond his literary accomplishments, this wily 69-year-old's work has influenced, consciously or unconsciously, much of our pop culture, from Lost to The Matrix to Arrested Development to Lemony Snicket (for what are the Baudelaire children but grimmer Chums of Chance?)."
11/27/06 - Sci Fi Weekly - John Clute: "The hundreds of figures who jam into Against the Day are not in fact characters at all, because Pynchon has evacuated his book of that degree of hope. They are utterands: people-shaped utterances who illuminate the stories of the old world that their Author has placed before us in funeral array; they are codes to spell his book with."
11/26/06 - The Scotsman (UK), Scotland on Sunday - Stuart Kelly: "It is, in places, a raggedy, meandering novel....You might as well complain that a Jackson Pollock painting is a bit splattery, or that Miles Davis sounds a little improvised."
11/26/06 - Providence Journal - Sam Coale: "This is Pynchon’s nightmarish vision of hell, peopled by predatory capitalists, eager anarchists, and stray ghosts. Pynchon imagines a world run amuck. And it is awesome."
11/26/06 - The Oregonian - Richard Melo: "With a writer as publicity-shy as Pynchon, there is no way if with this novel he is calling it a day. If he is, then he's going out with a bang louder than an obliterating asteroid screaming across the Siberian sky."
11/26/06 - The Observer (UK) - David Gale: "None of this detracts from the unique pleasures of a mighty novel that will delight Pynchonians and seduce newcomers....The scale of the novel induces memory loss but as with balloon flight, or fever, the return to terra firma is accompanied by feelings of wise, wide contentment."
11/26/06 - The Independent (UK - Tim Martin: "Against the Day is a startlingly discontinuous novel, a work of full-spectrum intelligence and erudition that is at times bafflingly tiresome and ungenerous to the reader....Something in it will mean something important to almost anybody. But the parts make a chaotic whole."
11/26/06 - New York Times (Sunday book review) - Liesl Schillinger: "In Against the Day, Pynchon’s voice seems uncharacteristically earnest. He interrupts his narrative from time to time to lay down pronouncements that, taken together, probably constitute the fullest elaboration of his philosophy yet seen in print"
11/25/06 - The Guardian (UK) - James Lasdun: "...the book itself has no particular reason to end where it does, other than perhaps the adhesive limits of book-binding glue."
11/25/06 - The Scotsman - Tom Adair: "...a gaze that holds you in its grip for a thousand pages. Quite a feat."
11/24/06 - The Spectator (UK) - Sam Leith: "It is virtuoso nonsense; it is a giant shaggy dog story, serious as history; it is by turns mind-crushingly tedious and utterly exhilarating; it is remorselessly facetious and yet deeply moving."
11/24/06 - Milwaukee Sentinel Journal - Mike Fischer: "Ever since V. rocked the literary world in 1963, Pynchon has sought this crest with a single-minded intensity unmatched by any American writer since Melville. Against the Day, his brilliant new novel, gets him there."
11/22/06 - The Nation - John Leonard: "It's a Perils of Pauline plot as pulpy and fibrous, as gnarly and pantophagic, as a thicket of bamboo."
11/21/06 - Newsweek Pt. II - Malcom Jones: "Now halfway through, the reviewer knows the new Thomas Pynchon novel is full of doubles, an ocean liner that morphs into a destroyer and the kind of detail that's only fun if you slow down and enjoy it."
11/21/06 - Library Journal - Barbara Hoffert: "Brilliant if sometimes exasperating, Pynchon's latest is highly recommended for any library that takes its fiction seriously, with the warning that it does not yield easy pleasures and should not be read on deadline."
11/21/06 - The Guardian/Comment Is Free (UK) - John Crace: "You can read it or you can weigh it. My guess is that most people will opt for the latter."
11/21/06 - Salon - Laura Miller: "[I]t's obvious [Pynchon's] disciples now write better Big Idea novels than he does."
11/20/06 - Dissident Voice - Ron Jacobs: "Despite the bleakness of the times that these tales are told, an indomitable beauty resides within them, thanks in large part to the characters Mr. Pynchon creates, the stories that they live, and the approach to the telling by the author."
11/20/06 - Bloomberg News - Craig Seligman: "...I felt like an exhausted swimmer crawling onto the far shore of a body of water that turned out to be even wider than it looked. And like the swimmer, I remember more about the effort than the scenery I passed along the way."
11/20/06 - USA Today - Bob Minzesheimer: "Falling into a novel can be like enjoying a weekend trip to a place you've never been. Against the Day is more like going away for a month, getting lost on your way there and back, returning exhausted, but with bags full of stories."
11/20/06 - The Modern Word - Allen Ruch: "[F]or those willing to suspend disbelief and leave the ground behind, Pynchon’s great Inconvenience proves to be one hell of a ride."
11/20/06 - New Yorker - Louis Menand: "[W]ith this one there is the feeling that the magician has fallen in love with his own stunts, as though Pynchon were composing a pastiche of a Pynchon novel."
11/20/06 - New York Times - Michiko Kakutani: "It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex." (Written by Michiko Kakutani, so let the reader definitely beware!)
11/19/06 - Philadelphia Inquirer - Carlin Romano: "Positive adjectives: Audacious, bodacious, entropic, synoptic, electric, eclectic, entertaining, hyperbraining, high-roller, tripolar. Negative adjectives: Rambling, shambling, self-indulgent, non-refulgent, overlong, full-of-bad-song, seriously scattered, plainly mad-hattered."
11/19/06 - Cleveland Plain-Dealer - Jean Dubail: " All I can say is that the novel ends the way a Shakespearean comedy does, in which a measure of happiness redeems much of the horror and heartache that precede it. So, is the book worth the trouble? It was for me, but I'm a Pynchon fan, and bafflement comes with the territory."
11/19/06 - Washington Post - Steven Moore: “Pynchon fans will accept this gift from the author with gratitude, but I’m not so sure about mainstream readers.”
11/19/06 - Los Angeles Times - Christopher Sorrentino: “A book this long that amazes even 50% of the time is amazing.”
11/19/06 - Austin American-Statesman - Roger Gathman: "Forget it, fellow Pynchonians. [Against the Day] isn’t “Gravity’s Rainbow II.” That time, that place and that writer won’t ever come together again.”
11/19/06 - Newsday - Scott McLemee: "[A] novel as exhilarating, tiresome, unnerving and exhausting as all the others put together.”
11/19/06 - Boston Globe - Mark Feeney: "There's a bop electricity to Pynchon: the furious tempos and difficult harmonies, the maverick stance and hipster attitude....[M]aybe another Pynchon novel? If one comes, let it be as rich and sweeping, wild and thrilling, as this one."
11/17/06 - Seattle Times - John Freeman: "It's like dropping a penny into an open manhole — the novel simply swallows the time and asks for more. And yet, Pynchon does reward the effort."
11/17/06 - Newsweek Pt. I - Malcom Jones: "But you’ve got to understand that this novelistic mountain we’re climbing, well, I’ve never been to the top either. Just a reminder. Stay tuned. Next time: are Thomas Pynchon and Bob Dylan the same person? "
11/16/06 - Time Out New York - Joshua Rothkopf: "Pynchon’s gift for language remains undiminished, a roiling, imaginative flood that makes his voice utterly unique, and his latest a must-read."
11/15/06 - New York Sun - Adam Kirsch: "The silliness of "Against the Day" about the very subjects where we are most urgently in quest of wisdom proves that, whatever he once was, Thomas Pynchon is no longer the novelist we need."
11/14/06 - The Complete Review: "[I]mpressive in its parts, but near confounding as a whole."
11/14/06 - The Phoenix - Peter Keough: “Undaunted in the past by the big questions that bug a guy, he here takes on, in addition to the elusive quality of light... time travel, multiple universes, the death struggle between anarchism and capitalism, the dance of order and chaos.”
11/13/06 - Time - Richard Lacayo: “More than in any of Pynchon’s previous books, just what it all means is a problem in Against the Day, where plots and ideas and fantastic developments pile up in exhausting profusion.”
11/3/06 - The Modern Word (first impressions): "It seems like the logical evolution/conclusion to Pynchon’s career as a prose experimentalist."
10/24/06 - Publisher's Weekly: "[R]eads like half a dozen books duking it out for his, and the reader’s, attention. Most of them shine with a surreal incandescence, but even Pynchon fans may find their fealty tested now and again."
